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Ivo van Hove - Antigone

When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was
shot down in Ukrainian airspace in July 2014, the ambiguities over
who was responsible for such an atrocity, with the warring Russian
and Ukrainian governments blaming each other, left its 298 victims in
limbo. As they were found, the bodies were put into body bags, loaded
onto trucks and taken to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv for
identification some 170 miles from the crash site. With a Dutch
forensic team leading the operation, some 274 bodies were finally
flown to Eindhoven a week after the crash. Further searches were
suspended due to ongoing conflicts around the site.

Such a tragic by-product of war had a
special resonance for Ivo Van Hove's production of Antigone, which
opens at Edinburgh International Festival this weekend following a
London run earlier this year in co-production with the Barbican, EIF
and a host of European partners. Apart from the very obvious parallel
with Sophocles' eponymous heroine's attempts to bury the body of her
brother, who had been caught in the crossfire of a civil war, the
event had a more personal resonance.

One of the victims of the attack was a
friend and associate of Van Hove and Toneelgroep, the Amsterdam-based
theatre company he has led since 2001, and two weeks before the crash
DJed at a party to celebrate the company's production of Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead.

“The plane had 200 Dutch people on
it,” Van Hove explains, “and we still don't know who attacked it,
but because it was shot down in the middle of a war zone, all the
bodies were laying in the bare fields in the middle of the suburbs
rotting. Nobody could get to them, and I really think it was an act
of barbarism to do that, to kill somebody but not let anyone treat
the bodies. Suddenly doing Antigone became such a close personal
thing because of the loss of someone we'd seen two weeks before, and
who was on that plane with his girlfriend. Suddenly you wonder how
anyone can do that to him. For me that became the human starting
point of the production.”

By this time, Van Hove had spent more
than a year talking with Juliette Binoche, the French legend who
plays Antigone, about what play they might do together, and whether
Antigone was something they should even be doing at all.

“What mesmerised me about Antigone,”
Van Hove says, “is that it is a play that contains simple but
complex themes, because the most simple things turn out to be the
most complex to solve. Of course, it's a political story, with this
clash between two very different antagonistic viewpoints, but I think
Antigone acts because she needs to act. She has to bury her brother.

“For me it became revealing reading
Oedipus in Colonus, which is the play that precedes Antigone. There
is this wonderful scene between Antigone and her brother, where she
criticises him about this war. She says don't do it, don't create
disaster. She's very hard on him, but once her brother has died, even
when he did the thing that she didn't want him to do, for her it's
such a noble, human gesture to bury him.

“So this gesture from Antigone, it is
not trying to make a political point against Kreon. That's not in her
mind at all. It's a human gesture. The other thing has to do with the
fact that Antigone has not only lost one brother, but two brothers.
She lost her father a few weeks before, and she lost her mother,
though we don't know how, a few months before. So this is a woman in
deep mourning. She's not in an everyday frame of mind, and this sense
of mourning became a starting point for Juliet on an emotional level
as well.”

In execution, Van Hove somewhat
typically goes against the grain of how Greek drama is normally
rendered by showing the offstage events that are usually only
reported after the fact.

“The trouble with the Greek plays is
that they're very short,”he says, “and you have to deal with
these very complex ideas in a really short space of time. In order to
liberate all these themes I decided to showing scenes that are talked
about, but which normally you never see. I'm not interested in doing
it as the Greeks did it, because they've done it already.”

Antigone marks van Hove's first
appearance at Edinburgh International Festival since 1998 at the end
of a period when he brought radical takes on Eugene O'Neill's More
Stately Mansions, Albert Camus' version of Caligula and Marguerite
Duras' India Song to town. Since then, his cavalier way with the
classics has seen him labelled by some as eurotrash, as an enfant
terrible by others. Either way, none of this prevented van Hove from
winning an Olivier Award for his production of Arthur Miller's A View
From The Bridge, another play that combines the personal and the
political.

“When Kreon has also lost a son,”
says Van Hove, “he reacts in a political way. He says that there
has been enough problems, enough civil war, enough cruelty and enough
catastrophe, and that we have to try and fix our society and bring
some hope into it. So I suggested to Patrick O'Kane who plays Kreon,
not to play him as an authoritarian tyrannical bully, but to be a
rational person who thinks he can be a better leader and be someone
who can guide his people to a better future.”

This again couldn't be more pertinent.

“We've tried to turn this play of
ideas into a play of human beings,” Van Hove says. “It's a play
about a brutal civil war turned into a play about the human
condition.”

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About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.